Summer Research Interns 2007
Chapman, Rava (Psychology)
School: Alabama State University
UCLA Faculty Research Advisor: Jeffrey Wood

I participated in the 2007 Summer Research for Undergraduates Program (SRUP) under the Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program (IRSP). This was a great experience. It allowed me to develop more as a researcher and gave me some clinical experience as well. I was able to work with Professor Jeffery Wood on a project about parent-child relationship. I focused on parental intrusiveness. In addition to great research opportunities provided by this program, I was able to meet many people who I have remained in contact with. This was a great way to spend the summer.
Cortes, Rodolfo (Psychology)
School: UC Berkeley
UCLA Faculty Research Advisor: Sandra Graham

It was a great honor to have interned at UCLA with Professor Sandra Graham. With the help of IRSP Graduate Affiliate Alice Ho, I analyzed the role of reciprocal friendship as a buffer against loneliness and social anxiety in a large ethnically diverse sample of urban sixth-graders. The findings will be presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence in 2008. In the future, we hope to turn the work into a publication.
Apart from the internship itself, IRSP afforded numerous networking opportunities. Notably, I met Professor Jeff Wood and proposed a follow-up study of the children from his earlier research. That study is getting underway and we are very excited. None of this could have been possible without IRSP; thus, I sincerely encourage any student interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in the relevant fields to apply to and choose IRSP.
Smith, Zaneta (Psychology)
School: Spelman College
UCLA Faculty Research Advisor: Tom Bradbury

My research this summer examined the intergenerational transmission of marital discord using a case study approach of a couple who participated in the UCLA Marriage and Family Development Project. By viewing the available data of videotaped laboratory interactions, audiotapes, and questionnaires, I gathered information on the couple. To some extent, their marital discord and divorce after 10 years of marriage may have been a product of marital discord and divorce in their parents’ marriage. My examination of 4 variables--parental divorce, aggression, parental religion, and communication -- suggested that these factors, along with interpersonal problems, may continue through generations and contribute to marital discord.
UCLA Undergraduate Research Interns 2006-2007
Aguirre, Jesus Alejandro (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Rena Repetti

I am very grateful to work on Professor Repetti and Campos' research into family stress interactions. Their novel coding system for behavior is by far the most detailed that I have ever seen or know of. My duty, among three other undergrads, is to code family interactions and behavior, taped for two days, in 30 second intervals . It is interesting to witness and code family behavior that would otherwise be overlooked in a naturalistic setting. This research opportunity is giving me an enormous amount of hands-on training which is something that will be very useful to me in pursuing higher studies.
Albert, Gina (Sociology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Mignon Moore

I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to work with Professor Moore. The main subject of her research is Family Sociology. I will be assisting in the preparation of the book manuscript for "Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women". I will also be preparing annotated bibliographies of selected references, coding interview transcripts, preparing excel sheet information from data retrieved from interview dataset, and assisting in the preparation of the reference list. I will assist the faculty in the data analysis and manuscript preparation for the paper "Interracial Couples in Marital and Nonmarital Relationships: Contexts, Processes and Outcomes for Parents and Children" by retrieving journal articles and book manuscripts for the literature review, developing end note catalog for references.
Anulao, Liza (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Anne Peplau

I am excited to help conduct research in two projects that are among the first to investigate the effects LGBT stress on relationships, and not just on the individual. Using both inter-group and inter-personal frameworks, we are interested in examining the relationships between identity, stressors related to having a minority sexual status, andd couple well-being. Under the supervision of graduate students Natalya Maisel and Adam Fingerhunt, my involvement in this research ranges from recruiting participants, sending regular email reminders to subjects, and helping to design and trouble-shoot an online questionnaire. I am eager to get my hands dirty in this field of the social psychology of LGBT relationships, especially since the projects' results will bear direct consequences in the legal arena, public policy, and LGBT psychological health.
Chan, Vincent (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Jeffrey Wood

I feel honored to explore childhood anxiety with Dr. Wood and the graduate students in the KATES (Kids Adapting to Elementary School) study. It is very interesting to see if kids' relationships with parents and friends might be important indicators of their anxiety level. I have been monitoring the database of KATES which will be used for public presentation later. From coding the kids' behavior to assisting graduate students in giving treatment to the anxious kids, from data entry to managing the whole database, the diversity of the work of this internship provides such a marvelous opportunity to learn more outside class by conducting research with the renowned faculty here.
Di Piazza, Kelsie (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Rena Repetti

This research focuses on family relationships and how stress in the workplace affects home life. 32 families have been filmed and I help code the data. I am looking for both positive and negative behaviors and interactions among the families.
Franklin, Megan (Political Sciences and Women Studies)
Faculty Research Advisor: Anne Peplau

I will be working with Natalya Maisel, IRSP trainee, and Adam Fingerhunt, doctoral student, to do research on LGBT relationships. We will be studying how several factors affect relationships of lesbian and gay individuals, such as stress, couple type, and identity. We will also be studying how identity and couple type act as moderators on stress.
Jurado, Elena Marisol (Anthropology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Linda Garro

I will be participating in ongoing data analysis in a study of health and wellbeing in working families, conducted by the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF). I will have responsibilities such as collaborating on the development of appropriate coding structures to code video and audio data, watching video tape to code scenes expressing particular themes, assiting with literature review and bibliography development, and participating in CELF workshops.
Kelleher, Daniel (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Rena Repetti

I am involved in Rena Repetti and Belinda Campos' Decompression study into family stress interactions. Its purpose is to examine the effects of work-related stress on the home environment, especially the interactions between family members. Video of the home activities of many families was collected and levels of stress were measured through both objective and subjective means. My role in this study is to watch the video of the families and code the interactions between members, focusing on the responsiveness to bids for attention, amount of talking, and emotional tone.
Yushiu Lin (Biochemistry, French minor)
Faculty Research Advisor: Jeffrey Wood

As a part of the Kids Adjusting to Elementary School (KATES) study, I work in understanding how school children view friendships and their relationships with their parents. Early on, I transcribed assessment interviews with the subjects and collected behavioral data by coding subjects on the playground. Since Fall of 2006, I have started training and supervising research assistants in interviews and assessments, an exciting opportunity that allows me to gain even more nuanced insight into our subjects and their performance in assessments. I continue to learn about recurring trends in subject behavior, how anxiety plays into the subjects' social interactions and how ongoing therapy can alleviate certain anxieties.
McFoy, Sofia Ann Marie (Anthropology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Linda Garro

I will be working with Mara Buchbinder,IRSP trainee, on her research focusing on the relationship between chronic illness and family dynamics. Through an examination of how family members communicate illness, she hopes to illuminate the impact of these experiences on the function and organization of families in their everyday activities. Research in this discipline, has focused primarily on the dynamics of the doctor/patient relationship. This work will contribute to the dialogue in health communication by providing new insights as to how illness and health are communicated "informally" amongst family members day to day.
Misra, Guitanjalie (Education)
Faculty Research Advisor: Linda Sax

This research proposes to look at: a) the characterisitics of graduates of single-gender high schools and how they compare to graduates of coeducational high schools, b) how attendance at single-gender high schools predict student's level of adjustment, performance, satisfaction, and overall development once they enter college environment, c) how students themselves describe, in their own words, the impact of single-gender schools. As part of my duties, I will recruit college students who attended single-gender schools to participate in focus groups and interviews.
Mussard, Erika (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Rena Repetti

This research, conducted by Professors Rena Repetti and Belinda Campos, is on the social interactions in family life and emotional tone. I will be applying a behavioral coding system to the video footage that has been collected for this project. This project involves many methods such as naturalistic behavioral analysis, longitudinal designs and questionnaire data. I will be involved in the naturalistic behavioral analysis.
Rehfeldt, Diana (Education)
Faculty Research Advisor: Mignon Moore

As an intern for Dr. Walter Allen and Kimberly Griffin, I am working on a few research projects ranging from the social construction of sexuality to the mentoring relationships among African-American professors. Currently, I am also developing my senior thesis and McNair Scholars project examining how shifting demography affects year-round track schools. My research focuses on the educational experience of high school students within and across three tracks.
Victor Rodionoff (Political Science)
Faculty Research Advisor: Anne Peplau

The research project I am engaged in examines the impact of alternative and nontraditional market logics on social relationships. Our work focuses primarily on a weeklong, annual gathering called Burning Man, which is premised on a gift economy—a system in which the giving of gifts is done without expectation of reciprocity or compensation. Our underlying objective is to understand whether, to what extent, and in what manner this alternative relational network engenders new patterns of social interaction beyond the event itself. I have gained insight into fascinating nontraditional market phenomena, and how they impact various levels of social engagement and community.
Jitka Sammartinova (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Jeffrey Wood

As a supervisor of a coding team in the Kids Adjusting to Elementary School (KATES) longitudinal study, I have had the opportunity to study the behavior of both typically developing and anxious children. I currently oversee seven undergraduate research assistants whom I have trained in coding. My responsibilities include collecting and entering behavioral data, elaborating the coding schedule, and meeting with coders. Participation in this research study allowed me to learn about relationships between anxiety and children's local social world.
Spaltro, Serap (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Anne Peplau

We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers from psychology, sociolgy, anthropology, political science, and economics. Drawing from each of our strengths, we aim to understand and learn from the gift economy of Burning Man, an annual gathering and art festival. The gift-giving practices of Burning Man participants connects strangers within a growing social network that extends beyond the event in space and time. As a psychology major I am interested in understanding how the act of giving affects participants on a personal level. We also want to know why many people claim that the event transforms them and how that transformation affects their relationships outside the event.
Kristine Van Hamersveld (Anthropology, Middle Eastern and North African Studies minor)
Faculty Research Advisor: Marjorie Harness Goodwin

Making use of videotapes of family interaction , we will investigate trajectories that are constructed as parent and children negotiate disputes resulting from directing/response sequences, interactions in which parents are attempting to get their children to do something. Our hypothesis is that the interactive strategies that children laern in the context of parent-child interaction are consequential for larger social processes, such as how children negotiate with siblings and friends, how they engage in playful interactions with others, how they explore new domains of knowledge, etc.
Vanessa Marie Villarreal (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Sandra Graham

To conduct analyses, I plan to use data from an ongoing longitudinal study on students' transition to high school.  The nature of this study involves assessing how the stability of perceived popularity status relates to measures of aggression, physical attractiveness, and self-worth amongst sixth grade students.  I also wish to examine differences in GPA, timing of pubertal onset, school engagement, social competence, teacher reported internalizing, social adjustment, and social anxiety levels between these groups of students.  I plan to do this by creating four student groups; a stable popular group which will consist of students considered popular by their peers in both the Fall and the Spring, a group perceived as popular in the Fall but not in the Spring, a group who is unpopular in the Fall but who gain popularity in the Spring, and a stable popular group of students who fail to gain popularity throughout the entire school year.  Specifically, my objective is to examine whether the above variables serve as instruments or deterrents to achieving a popular status over the course of the year.
Wylie Wan (Psychology)
Faculty Research Advisor: Tom Bradbury

I work with Professor Bradbury on investigating families and their contextual environments. I will be using the Census data to gather information on zip codes provided by participants. It is interesting to identify social patterns between families and their respective neighborhoods. This reserach gives me the opportunity to learn how families are affected by their communities and possibly identify factors that may help families that live in more risk-prone environments.
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